The Post-Normal Times

I was going to follow-up on the last post with a few more comments about scientists taking policy positions but sometimes events and even scientists speak for themselves. So you have probably already seen or heard about the conflict between Jim Hansen, who directs the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, and the administration, through politically appointed officials in charge of public affairs, about whether or not he or any other government scientist are free to explain or express opinions about the policy implications of their scientific findings. So I’ll be brief.

As Dr. Hansen pointed out, in an interview with the New York Times, “It would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA’s mission statement includes the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet.” On the other hand, the job of politically appointed public affairs officers, is “to make the president look good” – according to comments made by the recently appointed George Deutsch to Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer at Goddard who is a career civil servant. Of course, as Hansen also points out, there is no paper trail of this – which, as Chris Mooney suggests, is probably deliberate.

So, as in the wiretapping case, what we have here is a president who is circumventing the laws of the United States that he is sworn to uphold. Bush could, of course, seek a change in the law so as to redefine NASA’s mission – and admit that he gives higher priority to searching for water on Mars than to the health and welfare of Americans and other human beings, for which maintaining a habitable Earth is a prerequisite. And if he is successful, we would then be able to send him to Mars too. But if not, let the impeachment proceedings begin.

Desperate to hear someone take leadership and present a strategy for this actually happen, I went to hear Al Gore’s speech a few weeks ago, live at Constitution Hall, and was not disappointed. Although the main focus of Gore’s speech was on illegal eavesdropping on American citizens, his core message was about danger to the Constitution caused by the loss of checks and balances among the different branches of government. Well, Gore wouldn’t be Gore if he didn’t also make an example out of science and global warming – he also mentioned White House censorship of James Hansen, in making a case for why checks and balances are critical to getting good scientific and other information to be considered in policy decisions. Here I think he departed from prepared remarks when he explained that it is only because of checks on power that policy agendas must be supported with reasons, that are backed up by scientific evidence – and that different perspectives can be presented and challenged. This is normally done through the process of oversight hearings, which haven’t happened for a long time. The oversight hearings that Gore himself used to conduct as a Senator were legendary for making world renowned experts feel as if they were presenting a dissertation defense. The point is, science is not and has never been policy neutral. What sets scientists and other experts apart is that they can make a case, and also defend it with the best available evidence – which is the only way that an informed decision can be made. Science for policy is driven by values, which are implicit in policy goals and in the framing of questions it asks – and Bush is either with us or against us.

I have been occupied the past few weeks – moving my office, changing computers and attending a conference and stuff – but my new years resolution is to post on a more regular basis – and I have several posts in the pipeline which include comments on the flurry of recent posts on climate models, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (for which I wrote much of the freshwater chapter in the finally released technical volume on policy responses), and some notes and observations from the 6th Annual conference of the National Council on Science, Policy and the Environment that I attended last week.

Welcome to visitor number 10,000*, who followed a link here from Effect Measure, where you can find out everything that is and isn’t known about Avian Flu. So, with kudos to Revere, I’ll take the opportunity to post a few comments on environment and public health. For some reason, there seems to be more general acceptance of uncertainty on health matters than on, say, climate. At least I have never heard Bush say it was necessary to have certainty that the Avian flu has mutated before making decisions, even if his decisions have left much to be desired. And those who have serious ailments have no problem with the idea of getting second and even third professional and other opinions about what to do, and aren’t surprised to get different answers.

There is another observation I have been wanting to make. Public Health docs seem to have no problem taking on the political battles needed to promote public health. In fact, the Code of Ethics of the American Public Health Association requires this:

We promote the scientific and professional foundation of public health practice and policy, advocate the conditions for a healthy global society, emphasize prevention and enhance the ability of members to promote and protect environmental and community health.

as do the AMA Principles of Medical Ethics:

III.”A physician shall respect the law and also recognize a responsibility to seek changes in those requirements which are contrary to the best interests of the patient.”

And its a good thing too. Otherwise, our rivers might still be valued more as sewers, and our lives more miserable and short. In many places in this world, they still are.

So why is it that, in the environmental arena, scientists still dance around taking positions on policy issues? Hopefully, this is changing. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is somewhat of a breakthrough in that it explicitly connects ecosystems – which happen to also be the source of avian flu – to human well-being. The connection to human well-being is also implicit in the concept of ecosystem services, which refers to economically significant benefits that ecosystems provide for humans. More on that later.

~~~~~~~~~~~

*At least according to site meter. I have no idea how many visitors this site has actually had. Statistics provided by my webhost show over 40,000 visits and over 12,000 unique visitors. Of course, that includes RSS feeds, admin, and peddlers of poker and piills (I delete about 75 spam comments and trackbacks a day. My apologies if I have accidentally deleted anything legit.) This blog was launched last February.

In this earlier post, among other things, I spoke about what I call the Puccini factor, which you can only find in lettuce from Torre del Lago, but I’m also using the term to describe the unique qualities of a place, and of things that come from such a place, that you will never find in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), and that science will probably never be able to quantify. For example, grapes that are genetically the same, grown on different soil, do not produce the same wine. Like people, places have identities made up of unique constellations of the basic stuff. Unless, as in these Post-Normal Times, they are made to look like someplace else. I once read that a favorite way to pass the time in Los Angeles is to drive around looking for real neighborhoods. Even in the Washington DC area, you can find a place in Gaithersburg called North Potomac and a place in Rockville called Chevy Chase View. And in Chevy Chase, you can find a decontextualized Tuscan Villa - i.e., without the idyllic landscape. Where I live, a place I call Muddy Spring, one of the historic landmarks is the Tastee Diner, complete with parking lot. I’m not kidding. To be fair, there is also a postage stamp sized park at the spot of the original “Silver” Spring. But I digress.

Coincidentally, on the same day as I wrote about the Puccini factor, Ulisse SiFossiFoco (my favorite blogger and now co-author on a work in progress), put up a post that describes the missing Puccini factor, as he imagines it, and for which I felt compelled to provide a translation, below. For the missing SiFossiFoco factor, i.e., to read it in its original Florentine vernacular, click here.

I can imagine an American soldier in Iraq. As I imagine him, I ‘m certainly not thinking of a boy from New York or Los Angeles, but rather a boy who lives in one of those many parts of America cultivated with genetically modified corn that one passes through at two hundred kilometers an hour to arrive in a small town of few souls that has a commercial center, a small church, a sheriff ’s office and a bar where one can get drunk in the evening – as the sole evasion. I imagine him in Iraq, as one who renounces his own thought for the virtue of ready-made collective thought, manufactured for him by war-mongered (is there a better word?) experts of psychology, sociobiology and marketing.

I imagine him to be very ingenuous and, because of this, disposed to obey any order because that is how things are done, because everyone does it.

I also imagine him to be shrewd, because I don’t see this American boy as stupid. His shrewdness consists of wanting to earn a little money for himself, to count a little bit more in society, to have a house and remove from his back a pre-fabricated destiny as a worker of genetically modified corn in the enormous expanse of genetically modified cornfields that, for 18 or 20 years has been not only his whole panorama, but also that of his family throughout it’s entire history.

I imagine a military professional, like those emerging also among us here in Italy after the abolition of obligatory military service. A boy or a girl of this new Italian “professionalism”: the only profession in our economy that does not make use of flexi-time, day-labor, contracting, and temp work. The only profession that promises adventure on a fixed salary, as long as there is peace, and then, at a select level of compensation, or in exchange for a state funeral and a medal if the extraordinary is called for.

If I were to hear him speak, this American soldier, I’m sure that in between the folds of the slang of his cornfields beyond the ocean, it wouldn’t be hard to pick up on some accents of Calabria, Sicily or Abruzzo that fill the Italian military barracks of today: who knows why?

Something else happened in 2005. Henry A. Regier was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for important and continued contributions to Great Lakes Research at a conference of the International Association for Great Lakes research. Here is how he explained conflict over management of the Great Lakes:

Two strategies have been used within our Great Lakes Basin’s governance institutions in recent decades to cope with adverse interrelationships between humans and the rest of nature. Important features of each strategy can be traced back to different emphases within Darwinism a century ago. T. H. Huxley emphasized the role of agonistic or combative interactions within natural selection while P. Kropotkin emphasized mutualistic or cooperative interactions. Capitalists invoked Huxley’s Mutual Harm version for legitimation of their practices while communitarians invoked Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid version. Implicitly the more legalistic regulatory strategies that now dominate within governance in our Basin presuppose Mutual Harm dynamics and seek to temper such harm through pre-cast technocratic capabilities. Participatory democratic programs, now sub-dominant, seek to foster Mutual Aid dynamics less formally. Old Rational Management tries to Temper Mutual Harm Technocratically, TMHT. Drama-of-the-Commons Governance tries to Foster Mutual Aid Democratically, FMAD. Currently, the higher the level of governance in which action on some environmental issue is centred, the more likely that TMHT will dominate, and vice versa. This asymmetry creates problems in hybrid cross-level Adaptive Co-Management and vertical inter-agency partnerships.

Scenarios for 2006 anyone? Any idea what category those of an “Intelligent Design” persuasion might fall into?

Comments are welcome here and may also be sent directly to Henry at “hregier at rogers dot com.”

Update 1/11/06: the above was posted at the Resilience blog with some links added to more about Henry, the award and about adaptive co-management of ecosystems. To which I want to add: kudos and congratulations!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More housekeeping: One of these days, I will learn how to add a feed for comments to this blog – as suggested by James Annan, in a comment on the last post. Apparently, some news readers, unlike mine, refresh updated posts.